Chilling effect

At some point last week, as I was preparing to finally get out of the office after a long day of work, I was IMing with Margie.

There are two phrases I use in speech and in IMing.  One is “Praise Allah!” which is meant as in the same sense as “Huzzah!” or as an alternative to a hyperbolic “Thank God!” or “Praise the Lord!” — not disrespectfully, mind you, but just as another, idiosyncratic expression of relief and joy (think of it as an updating of “By Jove!”).  For what it’s worth, I picked it up from a family member.  I don’t use it much in public, just because some folks might be offended or take it as disrespectful (which it’s not intended to be), but I do occasionally say it.

Another phrase I use is “Let’s blow this pop stand,” a venerable phrase for “let’s get out of here.”

So, expressing great relief in being done with what I’d been working on, and indicating I was on my way home, I almost wrote Margie: Praise Allah!  Let’s blow this pop stand.

Yeah.

I didn’t write that, because I thought about what I was typing.  Or, more importantly, I thought of what the consequences might be.  There is, in legal parlance, what’s call the “chilling effect.”  It basically means that if certain behaviors are made illegal or subject to action, folks will not only shy away from them, but will shy away from still technically legal or permissible actions that might be skirting the lines or drawing too close for comfort to that dividing line.  If that line is fuzzy — what is “obscenity.” for example — most folks will stand even further back from it.

So, for example, if you have a boss who occasionally rips someone a new one over certain things they say, you’ll double- and triple-guess what you’re going to say, and most likely you’re going say less than you would otherwise.  Similarly, if you’re afraid if you say something about a person or topic, you might get sued — even if you would win such a suit, you might stay quiet anyway, not wanting the expense and trouble.  Ditto for cases where fair use of property rights (e.g., posting an excerpt from a copyrighted material for reviewing purposes) is clearly legal, but the owner sends out a cease-and-desist, threatening legal action, and you pull the material down out of concern they might go ahead with it.

Or, in this case — well, there I was, fingers poised over the keyboard, and through my mind ran all those stories of intelligence-gathering activities, and NSA computers that hunted down key words and phrases, and other internal surveillance “homeland security” sorts of activities … and I stopped, and rephrased what I was going to say.  Not because I felt it was wrong, not because I had a crime to hide, not because I didn’t have a First Amendment right to speak, or that I had a conspiracy to keep masked, or was a reasonable target of a Homeland Security investigation, or anything like that.  But because if some agency was sifting through Internet traffic and saw an IM that included “Praise Allah” and “blow this,” there was a finite chance that it might cause klaxons to sound, red lights to flash, and — if no jump-suited FBI SWAT teams headed for my door — perhaps my name would get flagged somewhere in some system as a “person of interest.”

That sort of grief I don’t need.

Welcome to the chilling effect.  Please double-check your words at the door.